Purbo Paschim

Purbo Paschim is one of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s biggest novels, a sprawling story that follows several families on both sides of the Bengal border after Partition. The title means East and West, and the book really does live in both, in Calcutta and in what became East Pakistan and then Bangladesh.

It is long but never slow. Sunil Gangopadhyay had a gift for keeping many lives moving at once, and this is probably the book that shows it best.